The fabled Amiga X1000 has been spotted in the wild, in the homeliest of places--Station X, a.k.a Bletchley Park. "The AmigaOne X1000 is a custom dual core PowerPC board with plenty of modern ports and I/O interfaces. It runs AmigaOS 4, and is supported by Hyperion, a partner in the project. The most interesting bit, though, is the use of an 500Mhz XCore co-processor, which the X1000's hardware designer describes as a descendant of the transputer - once the great hope of British silicon." With thanks to Jason McGint, 'Richard' and Pascal Papara for submissions.

Custom hardware is at the heart of what makes an Amiga an Amiga and the X1000 is highly anticipated, even with a frankly breath-taking price "north of £1500". The initial release of Amiga OS 4 for the machine will not make use of the 64-bit mode nor the second core, but this is expected to be fixed in following software updates.

New AROS Release Brings Improved 2D/3D Hardware Support, USB-Booting

In a news post on the 17th, AROS has added Intel GMA950 support by the work of Michal Schulz. The open-source Nvidia driver Nuveau has been ported, providing broad 2D support and selected 3D support:

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz has gone really far with his Gallium3D port to AROS: he has now integrated 2D and 3D accelerated functions in a single driver called Nuveau, which supports 2D acceleration for almost all GeForce GPUs starting from the ancient GeForce 2 cards until the recent GTX 200 series. 3D functions, however, are available only to GeForce FX (5x00), cards and upwards. Some models and GPUs might not be supported yet.

Support for installing onto, and booting from USB devices has been added which is a big leap forward for allowing users to test the OS easily, especially on netbooks without an optical drive.

Neil Cafferkey has vastly improved our support to FAT partitions, and also made AROS installable on USB pendrives (and bootable from them). This means that regular nightly builds, but also Icaros Destop version 1.2.2 can now be installed on netbooks and other USB-bootable systems using a memory stick instead of a DVD. Paolo Besser has written a complete how-to in PDF format, and placed it on the Icaros website.

New AROS Distribution, "Broadway"

Speaking of AROS and Icaros, Pascal Papara reports to us:

I'm the guy who did the german answer to the Imica (dedicated AROS-machine), now I want to give AROS a new face with my own distribution called Broadway. I released an early Snaphot of Version 0.0.2R6. You can try it under Virtualbox but it is preconfigured to run perfectly on AresOne and Imica-systems. For some info you can see http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5482 or www.aros-broadway.de There is also coming new "commercial" software like AMC = Amiga Media Center. See the showroom on the Broadway-page. PS: After getting the most done in the x86-Version I will start with AROS64 and PPC-Versions

All in all, good movement in the Amiga community. If there's any Amiga users or those suitably in the know in the audience that could explain how the X-core processor works and what it means for Amiga, I'd appreciate it, thanks. To my limited understanding, it seems like an FPGA? (like the C=One)